Building structures are increasingly being fabricated at a manufacturing plant at a first location for shipment to a second location, where the structure is assembled onsite. Major structural units are assembled at the manufacturing plant and attached to adjacent sections of the structure onsite. This approach reduces the cost of construction, increases the quality of the final product, and expedites assembly of the structure. This is particularly true in the case of low cost housing which is increasingly being shipped from more industrialized countries, to countries having a less developed economy to make comfortable housing available for more people of the world.
Houses manufactured and assembled in this manner are typically shipped in a closed container. The container must be of a considerable size and strength to enclose and protect the various house structural components and assemblies. The size and strength of such containers requires that they be reusable, thus requiring the container to be returned to the site of manufacture of the house. This procedure is expensive and cumbersome, particularly when the house is shipped to and assembled in a remote location in a sparsely populated and less economically developed country. The large size of a container required to ship a house or similar building necessitates considerable storage space during transport thus increasing the cost of this approach to housing manufacture and construction.
The present invention addresses the aforementioned limitations of the prior art by providing a self-containerized building structure, wherein the container itself is formed from the structure's multi-section floor which forms a substantially closed container when folded for receiving and enclosing the remaining portions of the building structure.